“In the middle of nowhere” is how our Founder would have described the loc­ation of the Tiger Kloof Edu­cational Insti­tution in South Africa. The school’s roots go back to the middle of the 19th cen­tury. It was closed dur­ing apartheid, but was re-opened at the end of the 1990s by motiv­ated “Old Tigers.” Since start­ing afresh with just 25 year 8 stu­dents it has developed into a board­ing school which offers hun­dreds of pupils from the sur­round­ing rural and eco­nom­ically weak region an excel­lent edu­cation, with res­olute applic­ation of the Round Square IDEALS. Dur­ing our visit in Feb­ruary 2024 we were able to exper­ience for ourselves the hos­pit­ality of the Tiger Kloof com­munity. Dir­ect­ors, teach­ers, admin­istra­tion staff and the stu­dents them­selves are all proud of the his­tory and devel­opment of the school and were delighted to give us an insight into every­day life in their school.

Meet­ing our 16 schol­arship recip­ients did the rest; “our” chil­dren told us about their dreams for the future and asked about the back­ground of our Found­ation and Founder. Once we had warmed to each other we prac­ticed each other’s nat­ive lan­guages and sang together.

Dur­ing our dis­cus­sions on site ideas arose as if by them­selves about how we could expand our cooper­ation, for example by extend­ing the accom­mod­ation in order to enable more chil­dren to attend the board­ing school, because we were very moved by one sen­tence of an Old Tiger which the Dir­ector of the insti­tution quoted, “The greatest gift which I have ever received in life was my own bed and a table for learn­ing at Tiger Kloof.”